ASCENDO Immersive Audio will debut its Panoramic Surface On-Wall, an entirely new loudspeaker designed around a proprietary full-range composite radiating surface technology, at CEDIA Expo 2026.
Developed first and foremost for the demands of immersive cinema, Panoramic Surface addresses one of the fundamental compromises that has shaped loudspeaker design for decades: as frequency increases, radiation patterns become narrower. Conventional cone drivers, dome tweeters, compression drivers and waveguide systems can be optimised to manage this behavior, but they cannot eliminate the physical tendency of high frequencies to beam.
For surround and height channels in an immersive cinema, that limitation is especially consequential. The objective is not to hear a small loudspeaker mounted on a wall or ceiling. It is to create a continuous, believable acoustic environment around the listener, with consistent tonal balance and spatial information across multiple seats.
Panoramic Surface approaches that challenge differently. Rather than relying on traditional driver layouts, angled enclosures, or conventional loudspeaker concepts adapted for surround and height applications, Panoramic Surface employs ASCENDO’s proprietary full-range composite radiating surface. The technology is engineered specifically to deliver wide-area sound coverage with minimal visual impact, allowing the loudspeaker to behave less like a conventional loudspeaker at high frequencies and more like a controlled acoustic surface.
The result is a wide and continuous radiation characteristic, extending to nearly 180 degrees into the high-frequency range, up to 20 kHz.
“Panoramic Surface follows a principle that has always driven ASCENDO: We don’t take an existing loudspeaker concept and force it into an application it was never designed to serve,” says Geoffrey Heinzel, Co-Managing Partner of ASCENDO. “We start with what the acoustic environment actually requires and engineer the solution around those demands.”
For the listener, that means greater tonal consistency across multiple seats, less audible variation between on-axis and off-axis positions, more evenly distributed height information, and surround effects that are less tied to the physical location of each loudspeaker. The result is a cinema that sounds larger, smoother and more coherent and an immersive experience that is less dependent on one perfect listening position.
Because ASCENDO’s Panoramic technology distributes its output across a radiating surface, a listener seated closer to a surround or height channel does not experience the sharp rise in perceived loudness that occurs with traditional speakers, giving installers more freedom to place seats near individual channels without introducing level imbalance.
Wide dispersion alone, however, is not enough. A high-performance immersive cinema loudspeaker must reproduce transient information, detail and spatial cues with accuracy while maintaining the speed, control and dynamic capability demanded by modern cinema systems. Panoramic Surface combines its wide-field radiation behavior with the precision and performance expected of an ASCENDO loudspeaker.
Panoramic Surface also addresses another challenge created by conventional surround and height installations: interaction between the loudspeaker and the architectural boundary on which it is mounted.
Because Panoramic Surface is intended to operate in close proximity to the wall or ceiling surface, the design can greatly reduce front-boundary SBIR (speaker-boundary interference response), a common issue with angled or off-surface-mounted loudspeakers.
Instead of introducing unnecessary reflection paths and associated comb-filtering artifacts, Panoramic Surface is designed to integrate naturally with the architectural surface while maintaining broad, consistent high-frequency coverage.
